This time around, we entered the plugfest competition as a technology provider at the AFCEA Cyber Symposium, which happened last week (June 25-27 2013) in Baltimore. We not only provided technologies components and data feeds to the challengers (San Diego State University, GMU, Army PEO C3T milSuite), but also built a very cool Fraud Detection and Money Laundering demo which was 1 of the plugfest use case for this cyber event.

Our demo was centered around a fundamental "Big Data" question: How can you detect fraud on 100,000s transactions per seconds in real-time (which is absolutely critical if you don't want to lose lots of $$$$ to fraud) while efficiently incorporating in that real-time process data from external systems (i.e. data warehouse or hadoop clusters).
Or in more general words: How to reconcile Real-time processing and Batch processing when dealing with large amounts of data.

To answer this question, we put together a demo centered around Terracotta's In-Genius intelligence platform (http://terracotta.org/products/in-genius) which provides a highly scalable low-latency in-memory layer capable of "reconciling" the real-time processing needs (ultra low latency with large amounts of new transactions) with the traditional batch processing needs (100s of TB/PB processed in an asynchronous background jobs), all bundled in a simple software package deployable on any commodity hardware.

For other plugfest challengers and technology providers to be able to use our data, all our data feeds were also available in REST, SOAP, and Web socket formats (which were used by ESRI, Visual Analytics, and others)

As I hope you can see in this post, having a scalable and powerful in-memory layer acting as the middle man between Hadoop and CEP is the key to providing true real-time analysis while still taking advantage of all the powerful computing capabilities that Hadoop has to offer.

(*) "we" = The SoftwareAG Government Solutions team, which I'm part of...(**) "Plugfest" = "collaborative competitive challenge where industry vendors, academic, and government teams work towards solving a specific set of "challenges" strictly using the RI2P industrial best practices (agile, open standard, SOA, cloud, etc.) for enterprise information system development and deployment." (source: http://www.afcea.org/events/west/13/plugfest.asp)